Darryl King’s blog ireckon

So here is something which is hard for all service businesses. Losing a customer, or customers who want to cancel their subscriptions. Remember that customers who choose to go elsewhere, or just have no need for your service anymore are not necessarily lost forever.

We recently chose to use a Search Tool called Keyword Spy to do some strategic reviewing of a campaign. We subscribed for a couple of months, which was great, and got great value out of it.

But in good systematised cost control, my Chief of Search (yes that is his title), came and said we can cancel that sub for now because it isn’t needed at present. We regularly do this as we use possibly 50+ tools to keep up with a whole bunch of areas to do with Search Optimisation and Marketing, so hibernating the ones we aren’t using at present is part of the beauty of Software (or tools) as a Service (SaaS).

That is when the problem started.

Let’s look back to the start:

- signing up was easy and automated via a credit card subscription service.

Now comes the hard part…

To cancel their service, one has to:

a) Email them of your intent

b) Validate yourself (I have no problem with that)

c) Go to their online cancellation form (oh good this will be easy)

d) Fill it in and print it out, then fax it back (oh seriously you have to be kidding)

e) Oh it gets better! They are US based (of course) so now I have to pay international fax rates for the privilege of cancelling.

f) but wait there is more…

[extract from their FAQ email about cancelling ]

We will process your cancellation upon receipt of the Subscription Cancellation Form. Please note that cancellation request cycle normally takes 3-5 working days to complete.

[end extract]

So let’s think about this. They will sign up me up live on the web but it will take more than 1 week to get this all in place to stop my subscription, which ultimately involves changing my status in their web interface.

Then the next paragraph sealed the deal - I think the language is a little bit off

[extract from email]

We wish to join you again in the near future as we continue to include and integrate more features in our system.

[end extract]

The English there is a little backward but given my grammar is not exactly perfect I will let that ride.

My ‘beef‘ is really that they have half got the whole thanks for leaving part, i.e. if we do it right you might buy again, yet their process does nothing to support that.

If I could login and deactivate my account whenever / wherever I can guarantee we would be a regular user of it.

Unfortunately for me, I (and my staff) just don’t have the time for this. There are competitors who do what this company does, and I guarantee we will be trying their systems before we come back to this one.

(Of course there are past customers any organisation has had where everyone is happy have left your business,) but in general any business that has lost a customer needs to audit why, understand the why and make sure they avoid churn as much as possible.

Then when nothing else can be done to retain a customer help them to step away so they have reason to remember you positively!

**Note to self: Go and check every one of our processes for customers leaving us, to make sure they are practical, easy and helpful!